This post was originally published on 7 September 2012.

All righty! Ever since the release of The First Bayonet, I have received numerous comments asking, “Hey, Steven, I have a Nook. Is it possible to read your book on it?” And back when it was not an italicized work (back when it was a novella, for the non-English geeks amongst us), I received the same question in reverse.

To the uninitiated: the Kindle is Amazon’s eReader, and is the device that really sparked the frenzy regarding eBooks. Not to be outdone, Amazon’s biggest competitor, Barnes & Noble, came out with their own version, the Nook. Amazon and B&N are bitter rivals in the online vendor business (though, as I can attest by my book sales with this release in comparison to my book sales when the original novella was on B&N, Amazon has the clear upper hand), and naturally, this means finding every advantage and method to force consumers to choose between one or the other. Think of it like a retelling of the Mac versus PC rivalry: up until recently, you had to pick either one or the other. It’s the same deal here. Most mainstream, big-scale books are marketed for both eReaders, but for independent authors, such as myself, you’ve got to pick one side or another, or pay some extra cash to get it onto both markets.

However, this does not mean that Nook readers are out of luck. There are several websites that allow you to convert MOBI (the document file that Kindle uses) into EPUB (the document file that Nook uses) and vice versa. One such website is Convert Files, which I have used several times. It’s got a real simple interface. Download the file to your computer, upload it to the site, convert it, and voilà, you’ve got a file ready for whatever reader you’re using. There are several other websites that I shall leave you to research at your leisure.

Now, one thing I have not addressed is digital rights management. To my knowledge, converting should not be affected by DRM, but then again, I have not tried to convert a DRM-protected file. If this is the case, and you have purchased The First Bayonet for Kindle and you have not been able to convert it, there are a couple other options. You can download Calibre to your computer (it is both Mac and PC compatible) and use that to either read the file or try and convert it there. Push comes to shove, you can e-mail me at stevenhildrethbooks@gmail.com, attach a copy of your digital receipt from Amazon, and I will send you a Nook-compatible copy. However, I would prefer that people attempt to take these steps to rectify it themselves before mailing me directly, as I do not have as much free time as I would like, and if I am bombarded with requests for Nook-compatible files, it may take me a while to get back to all of them.

This has been a brief rundown on Kindle versus Nook. I hope you all have found this to be informative and relatively painless. Happy reading!

-Steven